Alex Trebek bounds across the blue-toned stage, past the giant board of clues, eager to take questions from the studio audience. It’s somewhere around the 6,000th episode of "Jeopardy!" he has hosted, and interacting with the crowd, he says, is his favorite part of the job.

State of the Union addresses are supposed to be heavy on the broad language and sweeping rhetoric about people and parties coming together. The actual work comes days and weeks later, of course, but the president’s most-watched prime-time speech was designed to argue that America’s brightest days lie ahead—if we make the right choices now.

Many groups provide opportunities for Americans, young and old, to help their communities, their country, and people in distant lands. Some outfits require specific expertise; others are just looking for committed people to assist a good cause. Following are five organizations that put helping hands to work.

Washington is a city that loves to tweet—more than 200 members of Congress are avid users of Twitter, obsessively sharing their real-time thoughts on every legislative decision to pass through the House or Senate these days. And now the rage has spread to D.C.’s foreign diplomats.

Looking in from abroad, much of the world has historically been baffled by America’s gun laws. In no other country can a mentally unstable person access a Glock pistol as easily as suspected Arizona shooter Jared Loughner did.

From a year of enormous whoppers—like the president's alleged $200 million-a-day trip to India and the claim that the stimulus created not one job in the private sector—the editors at Politifact have identified the biggest deception of all.

After a Virginia judge ruled against a part of the health-care-reform package, the White House countered that it wasn't surprised. Many judges have had different opinions. The place where opinions will really matter, it seems, is the Supreme Court.

President Obama has taken some flak over his fondness for participatory sports. It appears to have caught up with him in a post-Thanksgiving basketball game, when he took an unfriendly elbow straight to the lip.

Clean and abundant, hydrogen is the fuel of the future—and always will be. Or so the joke goes. In California, for example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger envisioned 100 auto-ready hydrogen stations along the coast. After five years, however, only a few dozen are in place, and enthusiasm—not to mention funding—has waned. Without a larger network, automakers won’t commercialize hydrogen-ready cars. But without cars, few companies have been keen to invest in fueling stations—until now.

The Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to impose strict new limits on smog-creating emissions like sulfur dioxide. The guidelines aren’t due until next year, however, which has inspired a last-minute push for leniency in the coal-rich states of Appalachia.